Santa Barbara News-Press Thursday, 11/30/03
Hurdles lie ahead, but trains may play vital role for commuters
By MELINDA BURNS, NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER
Will commuters be riding the rails from Ventura to Santa Barbara in the next five years?
A growing group of local officials and politicians says it can and must happen. Santa Barbara, they say, has become a commuter city with 27,000 people driving in to work on the South Coast daily, bringing with them the traffic, noise, exhaust and parking problems that make every trip downtown a hassle.
“It’s inevitable that rail will come,” says Jonathan Maguire, a Santa Barbara planning commissioner who serves on the board of the nonprofit Coalition for Sustainable Transportation, or COAST. “We envision a three-train system which could potentially take 1,000 to 1,500 cars off the road. One day, there won’t be any more room to expand the freeway, and the railroad will be the only other way we have to get people in and out of here.”
A contentious debate over expanding Highway 101 to six lanes south of Milpas Street ended in a dŽtente last month, as North County and South Coast leaders put their disagreements aside, pledging to widen the freeway and to expand mass transportation for 15,000 commuters from the Ventura area. The politicians also authorized a two-year, $1.6 million study of 101 congestion using $200,000 that was originally earmarked for a report on trains.
The advocates of commuter rail say there’s no time to waste. It will take 10 years just to complete several “mini-widening” projects planned for the freeway south of Milpas. In the meantime, commuters can expect even longer delays.
“As we start upgrading Highway 101, we are going to see enormous costs in terms of time people are going to spend on the freeways,” says Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara. “Even if we put in that third lane, it’s going to take 10 to 15 years. Having a rail option may be very helpful. We’re in the preliminary stages, but I’m sensing the momentum building. We have to go for it.”
Santa Barbara’s Traffic and Circulation Committee, a citizen advisory group, will hold a workshop early next year to discuss commuter rail. The tentative date is Jan. 22.
Adding trains to the tracks will not be easy. Service on Metrolink, the nearest commuter train, stops at Montalvo, 28 miles south of here. But a new train can cost a minimum of $50 million, and the supply is low nationwide.
Cities and counties that provide commuter rail service usually subsidize about half the operating cost. Local bus service must be beefed up to take commuters from the train station to work. The trains must be stored somewhere overnight. And Union Pacific drives a hard bargain for the use of its rails.
There is only one set of tracks between Ventura and Santa Barbara’s bird refuge, and no siding where a train can pull over between Seacliff and the Santa Barbara Depot.
Scott Wenz, president of Cars Are Basic, a nonprofit group that favors six lanes for 101, says it’s irresponsible to talk about running commuter trains on the existing tracks, an option called “heavy rail.”
“Do you think the state Coastal Commission would give this county the right to go in with dynamite and blast some of our coastline to put in a siding?” Mr. Wenz asks. “Heavy rail won’t work. It’s obstructionism.”
But Das Williams, a Santa Barbara councilman-elect, says local residents can’t afford to ignore the benefits of commuter trains.
“By night we’re a city of 95,000, and by day a city of 125,000,” he says. “People have wanted to avoid growth, but the increase in the number of commuters has created all the impacts of growth. Even people who don’t commute are starting to understand that our congestion is forcing commuters to use neighborhood streets.
“We have to think about not just the next five or 10 years, but the next 30. I don’t think any freeway widening is a 30-year solution.”
Santa Barbara Councilman Roger Horton says the best bet may be for South Coast governments to buy trains and operate their own service.
“I’m optimistic,” he says. “Enough people are talking about it. The heavy rails are there.”
For commuters such as Kathleen Johnston, who rides a van pool from Ventura to her job at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital every day, it would be like traveling back to the future. Years ago, when she lived in Long Island, Ms. Johnston rode a train to work in New York City an hour each way. She read a lot of novels. On the way home, she says, you could have a drink in the bar car.
“Commuting is so much easier on the East Coast, where I come from,” Ms. Johnston says. “You don’t mind it if you’re sewing or reading or catching up on your mail. You never take your car into the city.
“If a train here were cheap, convenient and the times fit within my work schedule, I’d be open to it.”
AGAINST THE FLOW
Right now, only 13 trains come and go daily between Goleta and Ventura. Six are freight trains, and seven are Amtrak passenger trains.
None of the Amtrak trains travels at a time or in a direction that would help relieve northbound rush-hour traffic on 101 from Ventura. An Amtrak train that is stored overnight at the La Patera station in Goleta heads south against the traffic early in the morning.
Could this train instead be stored in Ventura and make a morning run to Goleta? Not if it is billed as a commuter train, according to Caltrans. Amtrak gets a third of its funding from the federal government, and these dollars cannot be used to pay for commuter service.
“If they start moving the trains toward a commuter-based schedule, they run the risk of breaking a federal law,” says Marta Bortner, a spokeswoman for Caltrans on the Central Coast.
Amtrak officials did not return repeated News-Press calls. But Ms. Bortner says the company was planning to add a new Pacific Surfliner train next spring, one that would leave Los Angeles at about 7 a.m. and arrive in Santa Barbara between 9 and 9:30 a.m.
“It would be a pseudo-commuter train,” Ms. Bortner says. “It would not be commuter-only rail.”
The Amtrak trains have about 450 seats. The fare between Ventura and Santa Barbara is $8 one-way, or $97 for a monthly pass.
Metrolink, the nearest commuter rail service, ends its northernmost route at the Montalvo station, near 101 and Victoria Avenue in Ventura. If Metrolink were extended to Santa Barbara, the fares would be about $6 one-way from Ventura to Santa Barbara, Metrolink officials estimated. The trip would take about 40 minutes.
Metrolink officials say Union Pacific agreed to allow two commuter trains to run north of Moorpark to Camarillo and Oxnard as an emergency measure after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. But two years later, Union Pacific tried to shut down the service, saying it was clogging the tracks and disrupting freight trains.
“It was an attitude problem that Union Pacific had,” says Mary Travis, manager of regional programs for the Ventura County Transportation Commission. “We had been operating for two years, and there were no serious problems.”
After a year of intense negotiations, including a visit to company headquarters in Omaha, Neb., by Simi Valley Mayor Bill Davis, Union Pacific backed off.
“We screamed at each other and said a few curse words for about an hour, but we came to an agreement,” Mr. Davis says.
It was not cheap. The commission pays $500,000 per year to use the railroad for two hours a day. Most of the payment is in the form of capital improvements, such as new lights, passing lanes and sidings, and tunnel repairs. Operating costs are additional and may be as much as $300,000 per year.
“It’s going to be tough for Santa Barbara even to get Union Pacific to sit at the table and then commit to a price that would be reasonable,” Ms. Travis says.
“Government can’t make the air quality or traffic congestion-relief argument to Union Pacific, because they don’t care. Their business is running freight.”
John Bromley, a spokesman for Union Pacific, says he cannot comment on the negotiations with Metrolink. He says Amtrak is effectively subsidized by Union Pacific, but all other agencies such as Metrolink using the lines must make capital improvements to increase the capacity.
The railroad through the South Coast of Santa Barbara County is not equipped to handle a large volume of trains, Mr. Bromley says.
“Operating passenger trains on freight lines unavoidably interferes with the freight trains,” he says. “But the reality is, railroads are under tremendous political pressure to continue operating Amtrak trains as well as favorably considered commuter train proposals. . . . We want to be made whole. It can be done, and we will talk to anybody who wants to do that.”
Today, Metrolink, which does the lion’s share of its business in the Los Angeles Basin, carries about 200 people daily on its two trains to Oxnard and Camarillo, and the Ventura commission wants to add a third train. Negotiations with Union Pacific have been under way for a year and a half, and still the company has not agreed to come to the table.
“My temper is getting a little bit short,” Mr. Davis says. “We have not been able to sit down and finalize anything.”
But Mr. Davis, who recently sat in stop-and-go traffic on 101 through Santa Barbara, towing a Blazer behind his motor home, believes commuter rail is worth the headaches.
“Would I love to see it up there? Absolutely,” he says. “Santa Barbara would be the most logical place right now for a commuter train. You can imagine what the ridership would be.”
BLUFF-TOP IMBROGLIO
Rail advocates envision thousands of commuters traveling to and from the South Coast, with new stations at Summerland, Butterfly Lane, Milpas and Micheltorena streets, La Cumbre Road, Fairview Avenue and Storke Road.
One of the biggest hurdles may be finding a location for a new siding.
In 1999, the city of Carpinteria rejected a proposal by Union Pacific, Amtrak and Caltrans for a siding on the scenic bluffs east of City Hall.
Union Pacific officials characterized the project as “vitally important to improving rail operations” along the South Coast. They said it was the only place between Santa Barbara and Seacliff where Amtrak trains could pull over to let freight trains go by. A siding that originally served that purpose in Carpinteria was removed to make way for an Amtrak station.
Union Pacific said that during occasional schedule disruptions, Amtrak trains were having to wait as much as half an hour elsewhere to let freight trains pass them south of Santa Barbara. A siding in Carpinteria would shorten the wait to less than 15 minutes, the company said.
But some residents questioned the need for the siding, with so few trains going by. Others said they feared trains might pull over on the bluffs for days at a time, blocking public access to the beach.
“It was right after we had purchased the bluffs,” says Dick Weinberg, a Carpinteria councilman. “It would have totally obliterated the view of the ocean. We really objected strongly.”
Mr. Weinberg and others also opposed Union Pacific’s plans to increase train speeds to 65 mph through the area. For one thing, they said, the noise would disturb harbor seals resting along the shore. Union Pacific did an experiment, slowing down a train and then speeding up past the seals, with no obvious effects — but the opponents prevailed.
Today, Mr. Weinberg says there is no chance Carpinteria would ever agree to a siding within city limits. A better location, he says, is near the Padaro Lane overpass along Highway 101, farther up the coast.
Carpinteria Councilman Gregory Gandrud, an advocate of highway widening, says trains may not be a panacea they seem.
“As romantic as the train could be, I’m having a hard time seeing how much it could help,” he says. “Can we get more trains to run at certain times? Probably. But people would rather have the extra lane. They express their individuality through their cars: It’s a very American sort of thing. We shouldn’t try to fight that.”
Ray Garcia, center, a Metrolink conductor, talks to two Metrolink engineers early Friday morning, before the 6 a.m. train leaves the Montalvo station for Los Angeles. Metrolink, the nearest commuter rail service to Santa Barbara, ends its northernmost route at the station 28 miles to the south.
